Diversity in Coaching

Working with Gender, Culture, Race and Age

Jonathan Passmore

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780749466633
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching

Published with the Association for Coaching, Diversity in Coaching explores the impact and implication of difference in coaching. The book looks at how coaches can respond to issues of gender, generational, cultural, national and racial difference. Understanding how diversity impacts upon coaching is a crucial element to coaching effectively in today's diverse society and can give coaches the edge when responding to their coachees need.Written by an international team of coaching professionals, the book provides guidance on understanding diversity and how coaches can adapt coaching styles and techniques to meet individual needs, local demands and cultural preferences.It explores the impact and implication of difference in coaching, providing practical information to help coaches respond effectively to issues of diversity.

01

Cross-cultural and diversity coaching

JONATHAN PASSMORE and HO LAW

Introduction

The primary aim of this chapter is to provide readers with an understanding and knowledge of models that may be useful to their business and coaching practice when working with diversity. We do this by first making a business case to show why we need such knowledge and then providing an in-depth review of the relevant literature and cross-cultural models that may be applicable to coaching. Finally, we outline a universal integrative framework that incorporates various cross-cultural and coaching dimensions as a framework for future coaching applications.

Why do we need a cross-cultural model?

With the developments of mobile communication and transportation, there are increasing movements and exchanges between people and businesses around the globe. The world is shrinking. Migration is increasing. For anyone in business, be it coaching or any other job, we need to interact with others who are different to us. For example, there has been an increased influx of people from Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom, which follows inward migration from India, the West Indies and parts of Africa. The United States too has seen significant inward migration over its history, and most recently continues to benefit from inward migration from Mexico and Central America. Australia too has seen inward migration both from people from the UK and from Asia.

In response to these changes, professional cultures, identified through traditional functionality, have been forced to merge and disseminate their skill sets to compete effectively and add value for money. It is increasingly important for today’s business managers, especially senior executives in global companies, to raise their awareness of cultural competence through coaching. The cultural differences between individuals increases the complexity of the leadership role, and adds to the individual differences between us all, which leaders need to consider. To unpack such complexity, it is therefore important for international coaches to formulate a cross-cultural model as part of their coaching framework, as well as consider issues of gender and generational differences. Traditional coaching and training models are no longer effective if they do not consider diversity as a theme. Thus, there is a growing requirement for coaches in an international arena to integrate cross-cultural awareness into their practice.

Rosinski (2003) highlighted this point: ‘By integrating the cultural dimension, coaching will unleash more human potential to achieve meaningful objectives’ and thus ‘enriched with coaching, intercultural professionals will be better equipped to fulfil their commitment to extend people’s world views, bridge cultural gaps, and enable successful work across cultures.’ Rosinski’s work (2003; 2006) is a significant force in our understanding of developing a cross-cultural perspective in coaching. This work builds on the thinking and research of other practitioners over the past three decades, particularly Hall (1976), Hofstede (1980; 1991), Trompenaars (1993) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997). Others have explored these issues from within the bounds of one-to-one relationships, such as supervision and counselling (Ryde, 2000; Sue and Sue, 1990).

A review of multiple dimensions of culture

Given the pretext from the above introduction, there is clearly a high level of recognition of the importance of cross-cultural issues amongst businesses, consultants and coaching organizations. However, when it comes to the question of the potential benefits of specific methods of addressing cultural dilemmas, there is a diversity of opinion about cross-cultural coaching and training methods, and there is an even greater diversity of opinion about the benefits of specific cross-cultural training solutions (St Claire, 2005). It is therefore important to critically examine the cross-cultural models in the existing literature and find a new, effective way to incorporate culture into coaching methods. But first, we need to examine the multiplicity of culture and its meanings.

Hofstede (1991) suggests there are three levels in human mental programming. The first is personality, which is specific to the individual and is both inherited and arises from learnt experience. The second is culture, which is specific to a group and is learnt. The third is human nature, which Hofstede suggests is universal and is inherited. Hofstede suggests ‘culture’ is a ‘product of the collective programming of the mind’. In this sense, culture is a system of meanings, values and beliefs, expectations and goals. These beliefs are acquired from and shared by members of a particular group of people, and it is these beliefs, Hofstede argues, which distinguish them from members of other groups.

Geertz (1986) suggests that culture is like ‘the icing on the cake’, and in that sense while not deep, it both changes how the individual is perceived and experienced and, in essence, makes us who we are. Many researchers have proposed that ‘culture’ is multi-layered, like an onion – a system that can be peeled, layer by layer, to reveal its content (Hofstede, 1991). At the core of this model of culture is the notion of values. These values are often hidden, both to outsiders and to those within the culture, as they are unspoken rules and norms of behaviour. But it is this hidden layer that strongly influences individual behaviour.

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model of work-related values consists of five dimensions:

1 Power distance – the degree of equality/inequality due to different individual positions in a society.

2 Individualism/collectivism – the degree to which a society values individual or collective achievement (which governs interpersonal relationships).

3 Masculinity/femininity – the degree to which a society reinforces the traditional masculine work role model.

4 Uncertainty avoidance – the level of tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

5 Long-term orientation – the degree to which a society embraces, or does not embrace, long-term devotion to traditional, forward-thinking values.

Indeed, most models of culture are multi-layered. For example, the cultural model of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997) has seven dimensions:

1 Universalism vs particularism – rules vs relationships.

2 Individualism vs Communitarianism – self vs society centred.

3 Specific vs Diffuse cultures.

4 Affective vs Neutral cultures – emotion vs cognition.

5 Achievement vs Ascription – active vs passive status seeking.

6 Sequential vs Synchronic cultures – single vs multi-tasking.

7 Internal vs External control – self-determinant vs cooperation.

Hall (1976) simply divides culture into high-context and low-context. He argues that the concepts relate to the way in which information is communicated and hence links to language, which is located in the outer layer of the ‘onion’ model. The assumption is that within the low-context, the listener would know very little about the context and meaning of the communication, while in high-context, the listener already knows a lot about the subje...